5 Weeks Old

This morning, McKenna turned 5 weeks old. This week, it seems that almost everything has changed in one way or another. Earlier this week, she was still hooked up to the oscillator vent. Tuesday she was taken off of that to try the conventional vent for the third time. She did very well with the conventional vent according to the monitors, but her blood gases just weren’t what they wanted them to be. They thought that maybe this could’ve been caused because the breathing tube that she had at that time was too small for her throat now that it has grown. They tweaked the settings a little bit and her gases then went in the direction they wanted. Wednesday morning when Dr. Nau called, he told us that she had been switched to the CPAP basically just to try it and see how everything goes. Wednesday night, Thursday morning, she was having a real hard time breathing so they switched her to a different type of CPAP. The first one she had was the two little prongs in her nose, and if she had any boogies, it wouldn’t allow air in through her nostrils. Now she has a CPAP tube a couple centimeters down her nose and that seems to be working just fine. Her PICC line was taken out on Thursday and now she is on straight breast milk. The only thing going into her body is the breathing tube in her nose, and her feeding tube also in her nose. Last night we were able to give our little lady her first bath. She didn’t really care for it, but since some of her patches weren’t sticking to her anymore, it was time. She has really figured out how to cry and it’s certainly a very cute little cry though. We have also switched rooms. McKenna was the only baby on the one whole side of the NICU, so we got moved over to the other side where there are more babies, but now a couple of her neighbors have been sent home. Pretty soon parents are going to be fighting over who gets the rooms closest to McKenna so they can get sent home. We hope that everyone has a very merry Christmas. If you are traveling, please drive safe. Our love goes out to all of you!

McKenna's new pictures will be posted in the 'McKenna Volume 2' link. Also, to get a really good idea of how much she has grown, goto McKenna Volume 1 and scroll down until you find the picture labled 'Holding onto her tube all sprawled out' taken December 5th and compare it to 'Thanks for fixing my shirt dad' taken on December 19th.